I planned this party for my sister's 31st birthday, but there was a wide range of ages among the guests and it worked for everyone. My sister loves Halloween and weird stuff, so she wanted a Totally Gross theme. I spun it into a Mad Scientist theme, which allowed for more of a storyline and plenty of grossness.

INVITATIONS: I kept these simple since they had to be mailed (the party was held at my family's house out of state). They were basically a full-page want ad reading WANTED: Mad Scientist Extraordinaire seeking new Igor- Will be accepting applications ONE NIGHT ONLY- Date, Time, Address- Prize awarded for the GROSSEST looking Igor- Serious applicants should be prepared for a rigorous qualification process involving hands on experimentation, gore, slime, and mayhem. I printed them out in Lucinda Blackletter font on green tinted parchment paper and sort of rolled them and mashed them down rather than folding them neatly into the envelope.

DECORATIONS: Guests walked through the front door into a sitting area that we'd moved all of our sofas and chairs into. We'd bought Monster Lab stick ups from Oriental Trading's after Halloween sale, so there were things like skull candles and shelves of oddities on the walls. There was also a life-sized mad scientist stick up on the front door outside and a hunchback Igor on one wall for a photo op. The piano was draped with a gray cloth and had a sign reading Top Secret on it. A DJ friend we'd invited brought some gear to have some music playing and green and blue lights glowing for a cool effect. We hung sheets to separate this front room from the living room/kitchen where the actual laboratory was. In the lab we had plenty more awesome stick ups on the walls. In one corner was my scientist desk where we'd placed a lantern and a candelabra, and strewn it with drawings my brother and I had made of invention plans (i.e. a rocket ship), animal dissection diagrams and other random scientific diagrams. We lined some shelves with jars of floating nasties, like pork stomach, pig's feet, squid tentacles, some kind of sticky fruit balls, anchovies, and a dragon fruit. Our local Asian Market was a gold mine for gross stuff!

We hung a sheet over the entertainment center with a Danger: Do Not Touch sign on it. We laid a huge black tarp over the carpet and set up three tables for the Igors to work on. In the kitchen we spread a buffet on the center island. Each of the surrounding cupboards and drawers had a label, like Transducers, Vacuum Tubes, Flex Capacitors, Bio Generators, Fish Heads, Cogs and Gears, etc. Then the back yard was my swamp garden where the Igors had to gather some ingredients for me. We set up a small graveyard with fake tombstones, bones and bugs in one corner. In the middle we made a bog by laying a black tarp over a frame of wood poles. Then we filled it with water and threw in some flour for goopiness, shredded newspaper, sticks and leaves. In another corner was a large swamp monster that was supposed to be a giant toad butâ€¦ by the time we were done with it there was only a vague resemblance to a toad so we dubbed it swamp monster. We built it out of chicken wire and paper mache and covered it with black garbage bags for a rubbery skin. Then we made warts/pustules to stick on it by melting shortening, pouring it into an empty water bottle and adding some vegetable oil, then squirting it into green grenade water balloons. The shortening eventually re-congealed and to become puss. We stuck a black screw through the top lip part of the balloon and stuck the screw into the monster to attach the pustules all over its back. They held really well in the paper mache shell. During the party it was dark outside and we had a fog machine running so it looked really creepy.

ACTIVITIES/GAMES: When the guests/Igors arrived they had to wait in the sitting area and fill out an Application for Employment using a syringe pen from OT. They had to write things like a made up Igor name and place of origin, the name of their previous Master and their reason for leaving, what top secret invention their previous Master was working on, whether they were here as a spy for their previous Master, and what their most recent acts of evil were. At the end of the party I read them aloud and they were hilarious! We'd also made a necklace for each Igor out of small bags of blood from OT. Throughout the party, if anyone spoke to me, the scientist, without addressing me as Master, someone else could call them out on it and claim their blood bag. The person with the most blood bags at the end got a prize. Once everyone arrived, I came out an announced that we would begin the application process. I got a lot of inspiration for this party from the Igor movie, where the Igors were treated like vermin by the evil scientists, so that's what I did. I spoke in a bored, annoyed German-ish(??) accent and carried a clipboard to make notes of how well or poorly the Igors were doing as applicants.

I also kept my party plan outline on the clipboard, hidden under the top sheet, so that I could refer to it to keep things in order. I announced to the Igors that the first task would test their Usefulness. I handed them each a list of three ingredients that I needed them to gather from the swamp garden, pointing out three empty containers on my shelf of jars. They had to pull 1 Muckpug egg (golf ball) from the gooey bog, pop one of the pustules on the swamp monster into a small cup, and find a piece of dead skin from the graveyard. We made dead skin by spreading cream colored Elmer's glue on our skin, letting it dry then peeling it off. Who knew a grade-school hobby would become useful? The second task was to prove their Presentability. I told them I needed to know that they wouldn't make me look like an idiot in front of my scientist colleagues who came to visit the lab. They got into small groups and each group was given seven small plastic cups, each filled with a different flavor of Shasta soda and labeled as something like Wasp Venom, Elixir of Life, Putrescence, or Guar Gum. Each team had to use those ingredients to mix up a drink for me to sample which they had to present to me with a flourish as though I was a visiting scientist. I chose a couple of teams as winners and they got to each pick a prize from the prize box.

The prize box was a large cooler filled with oily spaghetti noodles for them to dig through and find small prizes in ziplock bags. There were packs of Halloween candies like chocolate bat droppings and test tubes of sour candy with floating things in them from OT. The third task was to prove their Obedience. I'd found a recipe online for homemade slime, the one with glue and Borax, and written it up as a list of instructions. I named the glue Flitiplasma and labeled the glue bottles as such, the water was Juliwog Juice, and the Borax was given out in jars labeled Dunfundus Powder. Mixed in with the normal mixing instructions were things they had to do like Step 2- Touch right thumb to left ear and spin around three times to increase air flow over mixing area. I wandered around observing and making notes on my clipboard, and then awarded prizes to whoever finished sufficiently within a certain amount of time.

The final task was to prove their Resourcefulness. Each small group had to create a creature out of a can of Spam, a can of Vienna Sausages, large marshmallows and toothpicks. It was great the things people came up with! Pretty much everyone got a prize for this one. At this point I announced the Igor I would hire. I told them EVERYONE won, let that sink in for a second, then sternly snapped Except!... You, you, and you, and you and pointed out everyone except for the birthday girl and a couple of others. At that point I announced that we should celebrate and brought out the birthday cake. We sang Happy Birthday and had a pinata, which was a giant Nose with green pull-strings hanging from the nostrils (from CelebrateExpress.com's Totally Gross themed supplies). We filled it with gummy eyeballs and Dr. Scab's Monster Lab Body Part Chocolates from Candy Warehouse. We also had candy warts that didn't fit inside so we handed those out afterwards. Everyone was given a barf bag to hold their loot in (Celebrate Express). Then we cranked up the music and let everyone hang out for a while.

COSTUMES: As the scientist, I dressed all in black with a white lab coat on top, put on some bold make-up and put my short hair in tight curlers for a frizzy Gene Wilder-Young Frankenstein look. The guests dressed up as Igors- my sister, for example, let patches of glue dry on her face to look like peeling skin, used eye liner to make a uni-brow and some warts, and bunched some cloth underneath the back of her shirt for hunches. Everyone looked great!

FOOD: There were too many great Halloween type recipes to choose from I went with a meatloaf zombie (meatloaf molded into a human shape on a cookie sheet and baked), miniature pigs-in-a-blanket (Costco) labeled as Monster Toes (there's a Monster Toes recipe on Family Fun but it was much easier to buy them pre-made), a spinach-artichoke dip with tortilla chips labeled Quagmire Dip, red and grape jello ground together and labeled Brain, finger flesh fries from OT, a chocolate fountain with green colored white chocolate labeled Snot Fountain with pretzel sticks, bananas and apples, moldy popcorn made by adding green food coloring to a bottle of spray butter and spraying it on the popcorn, and cups of dirt (chocolate pudding covered with crumbled oreos and gummy worms) for the younger Igors. We used the Totally Gross open mouth dessert plates from Celebrate Express. The punch was fabulous- I found a recipe on Family Fun for Swamp Juice that looked really fun. We bought Eyeball Beaker cups from OT for everyone and pre-made individual drinks in them as well as filling a punch bowl with extra. I just made it with one can of frozen limeade per two 2-liter bottles of Ginger Ale. At the bottom you have tapioca pearls to look like fish eggs or rocks, which I found at the Asian Market because normal grocery stores only carry instant tapioca mixes these days rather than the pearls. In the punch bowl, as an added touch, we bought plastic aquarium sea weed, washed it and had it floating on top. The Eyeball Beaker cups were perfect for this because the tapioca pearls hid the eyeballs until you're actually taking a drink then it pops out at you.

CAKE: We decided on a Kitty Litter Cake (recipe is several places online, just google it) because my mom has a cat and all of us are always grossed out by its litter box. Some people couldn't even eat it, but it was actually very tasty!

FAVORS: Everyone took home a barf bag of gross-looking candies, their Eyeball Beaker cup, a syringe pen, whatever prizes they won, and their blood bag necklace. It was great fun! Happy Partying!